COMIC BOOK FLATS
100pc TOY SOLDIER SET WITH FOOTLOCKER !
It seems that the earlest known versions of these mail-order Toy Soldiers hit Comic Book Ads around the late 1940's and early 1950's. Amazingly, the various versions of these GI Flats went on to have a Comic Book Career that spanned nearly 40 years! Longer than any other known Comic Book Toy Soldiers.
So far, this web site has found Comic Book Ads from as early as 1953 that feature these GI Toy Soldier Flats (See Ad at bottom of this page.) They very likely were available well earlier than that but we are still searching hard for those earliest Ads from late 40's and early 50's!
The 1953 Ad offered the Flats as part of a Set called "50 Combat Action Toys for $1.00" which came with a "Free 6" Long Die Cut Shooting Cannon" that fired "harmless bombs". However the Footlocker box was not part of the set at the time.
A similar early ad from 1957, without the Footlocker, can be viewed below featuring a Set of 21 GI Flats and a BB Machine Gun.
It is not known exactly when the GI Toy Soldier Flats first got paired up with their famous "Footlocker" box, but a Comic Book Ad from as early as 1955 has been found so far which featured a smiling young General overlooking his table filled with troops with the Footlocker Box (see Ad below.) There are almost certainly even earlier Footlocker Ads but these have yet to be located by this web site. Please get in touch if you have seen the earlier Ads or have original copies of them to share.
By the 1960's, it appears that the Footlocker Box Ads took over and the other variations of Ads featuring these GI Flats vanished into time. The famous "100pc Toy Soldier Set Packed in this Footlocker for $1.25" (see Ad at top of page) became the standard for many years, a couple of decades actually.
The price slowly went up over time but the basic Footlocker Set of 100 Pieces never changed. By 1980, the Footlocker Set was still only up to $1.98 but the plastic seemed of cheaper quality and it looked to be of a lighter shade of Olive Drab than the originals, with the actual molds remaining essentially the same - although there were some slight variations in a few of the figures and they were now mostly stamped "Hong Kong" where the original figures did not have such a stamp and were probably manufactured domestically.
It is not known precisely what year these Toy Soldier Flats went out of production, but it appears to have occurred in the early 1980's. By the mid 1980's, only "3D" soft plastic Toy Soldier Sets were found in Comic Book Ads, such as the later Revolutionary War Sets and the more expensive Atlantic brand boxed sets featuring various modern Army figures from WWII and beyond.
By the late 1980's, ALL Toy Soldier Ads were gone from Comic Books - replaced by expensive corporate advertisements by large American Companies featuring various products such as comic book series, poseable action figures (such as Star Wars and Transformers), posters, food products, etc..
At that point, the glory days of the Comic Book Toy Soldier were over and they became a beloved part of Toy History known only to those generations of kids lucky enough to have lived before the days when mega-corporations blew away just about everything else in the Toy Business.
In the image below, a sample is shown of each piece of the classic 1960's/70's "100pc Toy Soldier Set" that came in the Footlocker for $1.25 and up. Like the original 1950's versions, the Set included 18 different molds, each having either 4 or 8 duplicate pieces. Depending on the year and maker of the Sets, some have "HONG KONG" stamped on every piece, some have the stamp on only the vehicles, ships and planes (but not the soldiers or cannons), and the earliest Sets do not have the stamp on any of the pieces.
Top Row: Rifleman, Infantryman, Machine Gunner, Sharpshooter, Jeep, Truck.
Second Row: WAC ("Women's Army Corps"), WAVE ("Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service" [Navy]), Sailor, Officer, Bazookaman, Marksman, Tank.
Third Row: Cruiser, Battleship.
Bottom Row: Cannon, Jet Plane, Bomber.
A note of historical interest: It appears that the little Jet Plane from this Set is modeled after a combination of the first two early US military jets. One was called the F-80 Shooting Star (which had the distinctive wing tip pods); the second was called the F-86 Sabre (which had the "V" shaped swept wing design.) Both were designed in the 1940's and were flown throughout the 1950's. So it appears that whoever sculpted the little Jet Plane for this Toy Soldier Set, simply invented the design based on a hybrid of features seen in the first two real jets used by the U.S. Military.
